Rahm Emanuel was elected mayor of Chicago on Feb, 22, 2011. Four days later, he showed up at a neighborhood theater. His appearance made national headlines; the attendant publicity helped make careers.

The venue was Theater Wit and the play in question was “A Twist of Water,” a collaboration between two young, Chicago-educated women, Caitlin Montanye Parrish and Erica Weiss, now the co-authors of a new and Chicago-based CBS drama series, “The Red Line.” Lyrical, searching and beautiful, the play strove to define a beloved but complicated city that just gained new leadership.

"We are the children of a risk taken," said the deeply empathetic central character, a struggling Chicago teacher and single father. He was desperately trying to believe his own optimistic words.

That was 2011. Time and the curse of police misconduct and pervasive gun violence would erode the optimism of that beginning moment, that seeming rebirth, as surely for the progressive artists of the city as, no doubt, for the mayor himself.

But the Tuesday news that Emanuel would not seek a third mayoral term was still the occasion for alarm.

“The thing about Chicago that’s pretty special,” said Roche Schulfer, executive director of the Goodman Theatre, “is that the arts are considered part of the basic fabric of the city. You just don’t see that in many other places. Rahm and Amy (Rule) understood that. That’s their mentality. That’s their understanding.”

There certainly is ample evidence for Schulfer’s assertion. Emanuel put in place a public-private plan for the renovation of the Uptown Theatre, something previous administrations conspicuously had failed to do. The crumbling Theater on the Lake in Lincoln Park was rehabilitated. Chicago’s arts-based festivals mostly flourished. When Jeffrey Seller, the producer of “Hamilton,” needed a power line on Northerly Island to make possible his tented Alexander Hamilton exhibition, Emanuel got that done, too, after making sure that public school students would be able to get in for free. He liked that Seller had not played one city against another.

Emanuel’s mayoral podcast most often featured the mayor talking with cultural people: Miguel Cervantes of “Hamilton”; David Schwimmer of the Lookingglass Theatre; Rainn Wilson, appearing at the Steppenwolf Theatre Company; Michael Patrick Thornton of the Gift Theatre; the award-winning chef Joe Flamm. His successive commissioners of cultural affairs, Michelle T. Boone and Mark Kelly, have been regarded as highly effective. At Chicago Shakespeare Theater, Emanuel is beloved not just for his support of major new construction projects on Navy Pier but for his creation of Night Out in the Parks, a neighborhood fixture that began when Emanuel found himself watching “The Taming of the Shrew” in 2012 in Garfield Park and has resulted in thousands of free outdoor performances in parks all over the city.

“Rahm has been a holistic gift to the city,” Barbara Gaines, the artistic director of Chicago Shakespeare, said Tuesday, sounding deeply sad. “He paid attention to the arts, he has shown us love, attention and support.”

And, of course, he has talked constantly about his own experience, albeit brief, as a dancer. Former dancers represent a very small group of big-city mayors.

Then there’s the behind-the-scenes muscling: the bringing of prominent and frequently reluctant CEOs to the table, the personal phone calls in support of an arts organization’s capital project, the promotion of Chicago culture to visiting dignitaries. He has done that too. And — arguably most significantly of all — he has shown up in person at arts institutions big and small. A few weeks ago, he was yukking it up at the annual gala of the Black Ensemble Theater.

These acts of support have not always made the papers.

As Emanuel announced his decision, cultural professionals were meeting with city officials about plans to designate 2019 as the year of Chicago theater. Presumably that will continue with a new administration.

Presumably.

“I haven’t heard any of the other candidates communicate anything about the arts,” Schufler said Tuesday. “But I am going to be an optimist and assume that will happen as things become clearer.”

Emanuel wasn’t the first Chicago mayor to booster its cultural institutions: Mayor Richard M. Daley presided over the creation of the downtown theater district, transforming the after-dark Loop, and Mayor Harold Washington was widely regarded as an arts-loving mayor. Where some see artists, of course, others see sycophantic celebrities looking for exposure and a mayor who should have been spending more time with different, less privileged Chicagoans. And it is possible to care about the arts, admire Emanuel’s contribution in that arena and still wish to see a new mayor.

So stipulated. But to argue that Emanuel saw the arts merely as a way to build the Loop economy does not match the facts. Emanuel uttered the adjective “neighborhood” in concert with the noun “arts” so frequently, to not believe his sincere desire to bring culture to all Chicagoans would mean you were accusing him of a series of bold-faced lies. In that philosophy, which he constantly put into fiscal, political and emotional action, he got much less credit from the progressive wing than he deserved.